D.G.

Thoughts

A couple of weeks ago, we went up to Nashville and hit a number of the sights. I’ll go ahead and split this into two posts, since I’ve only uploaded some of the relevant photos so far. The first day, we hit their recreation of the Parthenon. Apparently, it’s actually the second replica they’ve built, with the first being built in 1897 to celebrate their centennial but it was only built to last 6 months.

So. Was driving along last week and heard a big pow from under the hood. Knew that couldn’t be good, and it continued to make awful sounds, so I immediately pulled over and called for a tow. Tow was pretty uneventful. Just a quick hop across town via the interstate. Went in to take care of the paperwork while the driver unloaded my car. Came back out to find the car still jacked up and with the hood popped up.

Watched a little bit of the Speed network recently, and caught a documentary type show on Carroll Shelby. Basically, he’s responsible for the monster known as the Cobra (dropping a powerful Ford V-8 into a small/light AC body). Kicked some serious butt in racing for quite a while. After that, he’s done several additional iterations/refinements to the basic Cobra idea and worked with Ford on some more performance oriented versions of their Mustang and so forth.

So I’ve seen a few of these around and been curious. Finally got around to looking into it, and it turns out Scion is a new subsidiary of Toyota. Basically, Toyota has realized that it may not have to coolest image with the youngfolk and wants to tap that market. They sorta tried with the Matrix, but I’ve mainly seen a slightly older crowd driving them (hi dad!). Guess they figured they needed a new car company to accomplish it.